Rich men beg for poor men, as one man begs another to help him in bearing the burden which Christian duty imposes. Poor men beg for rich men, as faint arguers "beg the question." When poor men beg rich men to accept a little gift, they aim at a great benefit to their ownconscience. When Poverty begs us to give, we give, and obtain "beggarly thanks." When Poverty begs us to receive, we are taught, as Juliet would say, "to lose a winning match."

Lawyers who solicit the taking of shares in railroads are beggars for the "common good of the public;" of which public they, of course, form a part-and that is, doubtless, all they mean. Selfish and over-cunning men say, that these said lawyers play in a lottery which, to them, is all prizes and no blanks. We saynothing. The man who only begs hire is worthy of it. Who says the lawyer looks for more? "Who says not truly, lies." We mean nothing personal. Beggars of votes for election candidates are fearful intruders on the time of simpleminded men. Do they beg for the candidate only? Are they not begging something from the candidate, i.e. prospectively? Or, at the best, are they not begging for the mere political triumph of the party identified with their own personal ambition? They are awkward customers to any but the most independent. When the beggar has nothing to gain from you personally, though you gain nothing by giving, you may lose by refusing_to give. When Power, Pride, or Beauty, come begging into your house, Oppression, Contempt, and Scorn, wait behind them in the porch; and the reluctant giver, be it of his vote, his money, or his refusal, has acted with not more reference to the object professed than to the satisfaction, approval, or offence of the solicitor. We have not yet been forgiven by a very pretty young lady, who once planted her dainty foot in our vestibule, and with "most petitionary vehemence " begged half-a-crown towards a Bible for a pet parson. We certainly thought it the most gratuitous piece of benevolence we ever heard of. We offered the money as a tribute to her beauty; but this offended her

pride. It was for her to patronise clerical sufficiency by giving it more, but not for us to increase the abundance of her good gifts even by so much as thirty pence.

Beggars for others only. Where are they? We fear a very brief paragraph will include them all. There kneels one: a poor victim of love, begging Heaven's forgiveness for the villain who has abandoned her! There another: a culprit, in the hangman's hands, begging Heaven's blessing on the jury who found him guilty! Thirdly, a dying widow begging for her child! Lastly, a drunken man begging his hearers to "love one another."

We conclude by the brief enumeration of a class of beggars to whom no reference has yet been made, we mean beggars verbal, whose petitions seek nothing, and are, therefore, rarely disappointed. Your beggars of" pardon" are multitudinous as Heaven's mercy. They swarm and overspread the earth as thick as autumn leaves in Vallombrosa." We find in Shakspeare the thriving nature of pardon,

"An if I were thy nurse thy tongue to teach,

'Pardon' should be the first word of thy speech."

The school seems to have flourished since his day, "for we have pardons, being asked, as free as words to little purpose." How they are valued appears in another pertinent quotation from the same treasure-house of

knowledge: Pardon me, if you please; if not, I, pleased not to be pardoned, am content." A man begs your pardon when he contradicts your facts. He again begs your pardon when you contradict his. Ofttimes begging" pardon " is equivalent to giving the "lie." "I beg your pardon!" says A., in a pet; "and, d-me, I beg yours!" says B., in a passion. "I beg your pardon!" says C.; meaning, if you don't get out of the way he'll knock you down. beg your pardon!" says the gallant Mr. D., as he takes the point of Mrs. E.'s umbrella out of his eye; and Mrs. E. kindly allows of the removal, which is tantamount to pardon granted. "Pardon me!" says F., when having been stripped by the bandit of all his garments save

"I

one, he "must decline being stripped of that also." The French thief, in justification of theft, said, "I must live." "Pardon me!" said the judge, "I don't see the necessity for that." But unquestionably the best instance of gratuitous importunity is afforded in the well-known anecdote of another judge, who having received the verdict of "Guilty!" in the middle of a long story he was whispering into the ear of a lady close by, still proceeded, until long after the clerk of arraigns had called on the prisoner to hear sentence, when, suddenly recollecting himself, he "begged" of the unhappy culprit "a thousand pardons," and dismissed him without further delay to the condemned cell.

Your beggars "to say " are almost equally plentiful, for they are alike beggars, whether they have to communicate pleasant or disagreeable intelligence. Whether they have to say that you are utterly abandoned by hope, or triumphantly crowned with success, they "beg to say " it. In the same class are the beggars

"to inform," "to communicate," "to apprise," ," "to acknowledge," "to forward," ‚""to enclose," "to state," "to refer," "to assure," &c. Men "take the liberty " "to deny," "to correct,” "to doubt," "to repel," and to practise many other such terms offensive, when the tone of supplication might be graceful at least; but when they have to promote your happiness by information which rather leaves you their debtor, they follow in the perverseness of fashion, and humbly "beg to afford it. That a poor scrivener should "beg" to apprise his client that the latter is richer by 10,000l. is as paradoxical as that a wrathful foe, who threatens to blow your brains out, should "beg to subscribe himself your humble and obedient servant." With true earnestness, however, we beg to make to our reader such a subscription, and most imploringly beg from him that charitable indulgence of which this beggarly paper stands so greatly in need.

Locke, B. f.

MY DEAR OLIVER,-I have not forgotten the promise made to you at the close of the autumn in the past year, when we had that pleasant dinner together at Verdier Olive's in the Rue de la Poterie, in the Quartier des Halles aux Draps. Verdier Olive, as you well know, calls himself a gargotier only; yet how much better did we dine, my excellent friend, on that merry Tuesday for fifteen francs, wine included, than for the eight-andthirty it individually cost us on the following Thursday at the Maison Dorée, in the Boulevard des Italiens! The thousands of readers in whom you delight, sweet Oliver, and who still more delight in you, will ask touching the nature of the promise to which I advert. Be it known to them, therefore, that I then pledged

myself, in all the sincerity of wine, to give you some sketches of French newspapers and French newspaper writers, the which promise to the present writing I have not been able to redeem. Observing, however, that our common friend, who has in the last month addressed you on a late French trial, has broken this fresh ground, perhaps I cannot do better than follow in his wake. In a great many of his observations I do most fully and unreservedly concur; but I wish, nevertheless, he had so extended his paper as to discriminate between the riff-raff and rouérie of newspapers and the very superior superior not merely intellectually, but morally and socially superior-who are wont to write in the French newspapers. The scan

men

dalous habits and manners disclosed on the trial of Beauvallon are as little chargeable on the learned and respectable men of the French press as the practices of the Satirist and Age are chargeable on the editors of the Chronicle and the Times. I will not go the length of saying that the press of France is as respectable and wellconducted as it was eighteen or twenty years ago, when you were better acquainted with its details personal, literary, and political, than you are now; but I will say, without fear of contradiction, that the men who appear at once so shameless and ridiculous at the late trial at Rouen, as little represent the newspaper literature of Paris as they represent French science or French commercial or manufacturing industry.

In your own early days at Paris, dear Oliver, you remember the Moniteur, enriched by the contributions of Maret, Duke of Bassano, Berquin, La Harpe, Guinguéné, and Garat, and in later times by the labours of Tourlet, Jomard, Champollion, Keratry, Petit Radel, David Aubert de Vitry, and Champagnac. The most democratic or Napoleonic of these writers in the worst days of the Constituent, or the most slavish season of the Consulate, the Empire, or the Restoration, would never in the most unbridled season of festive gaiety so far have forgotten the sentiment of what the French call convenance, as in familiar and outspoken phrase, in a company of twenty persons, to address an actress of the Vaudeville, who was sitting opposite to him, and tutoying her blurt out that he would enjoy the last favour conferred by woman within six months, and for money too,-than he would have cut off his hand at a dinner-table, or unbandaged a green wound, and tearing off the diachylon plaster, place it on the cloth, and proceed to dress his festering sore afresh in the presence of the prandial public around and about him.

As to the Journal de Débats it has always been, as you are aware, conducted by gentlemen and men of letters in the best sense of both words. In your early days in Paris the two brothers, François and Louis Bertin, one the father and the other the uncle of the present proprietor, elevated journalism into a great political, so

cial, and moral instrument. François, the elder, was a gentleman by education, by birth, and, what is better than all, by nature, and, till the period of his death, continued editor of the Débats. His brother Louis, after having been for fifteen years a member of the Chamber of Deputies, was in 1830 sent ambassador to Holland and elevated to the Chamber of Peers. The greater number of the earlier contributors to this journal, as you well know, were men not only of the ripest scholarship but overflowing with learning. Geoffroy had been professor of rhetoric at the College of Mazarin, where for three years he successively obtained the prize for Latin prose; Dussault was a man of immense erudition, as critically learned as Porson or Parr; De Feletz was a fine gentleman and a man of the world; and Hofmann, a person of as varied attainments and as profound learning as was to be found in the realm of France. This, it is true, was a quarter of a century ago, since which men and manners have somewhat changed. But even down to the instant moment at which I write, I deny-most emphatically denythat any writer in the Débats would countenance, tolerate, or permit in

his

presence such insufferable blackguardism-much less practise it-as appears to have been tolerated and practised at the Trois Frères Provençaux by the feuilletonist writers and managers of the Presse, the Globe, and the Epoque. Duvicquet, the exquisite and rigid classic, the diner-out of the first magnitude, the man courted by the great and cultivated by the polished, with his fine sense, exquisite tact, and innate goodbreeding and calm good-nature, is retired to his native Clameci; Charles Nodier, the gay, the gentle, the sportive, yet solid-headed, is no more; Chateaubriand, the chivalrous and bizarre statesman and man of genius, is fallen into the "sere and yellow leaf." But these great newspaper writers for they were all suchwould, even in their maddest and wildest days of youth, as soon have thought of picking a pocket, or breaking into the curtilage of a dwellinghouse and stealing therefrom, as conducting themselves after the fashion of Rosemond de Beauvallon, the Sieur Dujarrier, and the Sieur Ro

ger de Beauvoir. Some of your readers, dear Oliver, may say that I am a laudator temporis acti— that I can see no virtue but in the past. But that is not so. The living and actual writers in the Débats would as little countenance such monstrosities. Armand Bertin, the editor and proprietor of the paper, is a scholar, and a gentleman moving in the very first circles of the Parisian metropolis; M. Salvandy, a very recent writer in the paper, is Minister of Public Instruction; M. St. Marc Girardin, one of its ablest contributors, is one of the most learned professors of the Sorbonne, and one of the most distinguished members of the Chamber of Deputies; and M. de Sacy, perhaps its most celebrated political writer, was bred an advocate, now holds a high situation at the Institute of France, and is one of the personal friends of Louis Philippe. As to Philarete Chasles and Michel Chevalier, the one has too much taste and learning, and the other too much common sense, to demean himself after the fashion of the detestable clique of the Trois Frères. Nay, even the feuilletonists of the Débats would loathe such company. Théophile Gautier has written some good articles in La France Littéraire, and an excellent book on Spain; and as to Jules Janin, though an insufferable coxcomb, and a species of French Malvolio, walking cross-gartered and wearing motley, he is incontestably a man of talent, and has greatly raised himself in the estimation of all independent men by the publication of his letter to Madame Girandin, on her comedy entitled L'Ecole des Journalistes.

As to the ancient Constitutionnel· that is to say, the Constitutionnel from 1818 to 1835-it would have shewn no quarter to such despicable and disreputable vauriens as congregated at our friend Collet's in the Palais Royal. Charles William Etienne, the late editor, was a scholar, a gentleman, and a man of wit, and author of some of the best comedies in the French language. For forty years of his life, during fifteen or sixteen of which he was a member of the Chamber of Deputies, he lived in the very best French society; and though a political writer lively and piquant, and full of strength and spirit, he

was, as Count Molé well and truly remarks in that scourging speech which he recently made to Alfred de Vigny on his reception at the Academy, above all, a gentleman and a man of the world, full of tact and good breeding, civil and polite to men, and deferential even to homage to women. What else could you expect from the author of the Deur Gendres? As to the lively little dwarf Thiers, formerly a writer in the Constitutionnel, though a man of very indifferent breeding, and brusque and unpolished manners, he always had too much shrewdness, sagacity, and sense, to mix himself up with gamblers, demireps, and commercial managers of literary speculations. True, you may quote against me the orgy at the country-house of the "Knight of the Bath"- Count (!) Vigier (bless the mark!) in 1833 or 1834; but this was a party of men only, invited to a house-warming by a vulgar nouveau riche and parvenu, to whom a château life was new, and no esclandre was the result. De Remusat, an ex-minister and very recent writer in the Constitutionnel, was always a quiet, well-behaved man, and no one knows better than yourself that Duvergier d'Hauranne was no roysterer loving to hear the chimes at midnight. As to M. Merruau, the present editor of the Constitutionnel there breathes not a more quiet and retiring gentleman within the enceinte continuée; so much so, indeed, that he goes by the name of Le Sacristain among his brethren of the broad sheet.

In your day Constant, Villemain, Cauchois, Lemaire, and Mignet, figured away at the Courier Français, and your friend Leon Faucher has not very long ago indited in it; but all these were grave, respectable men, unlike the individuals who flaunted at the Beauvallon trial, who were merely gamblers, bullies, and adventurers, speculators in a low style of literature, commercial managers of new literary firms and enterprises, striving before all things to gain money, for the maxim of these loose livers is," Qui a de l'argent a des pirouettes." It were a great mistake, however, I repeat, for your readers to suppose that these nien represent any considerable section of the press, for men of all shades and

complexions of political opinion repudiate and disown them. You well know that I am no admirer of that secular-minded priest, M. l'Abbé de Génoude, who, though the son of a poor limonadier of Grenoble, apes the airs of a Grand Seigneur, and aspires to the cardinalate; but though this sly and sanctimonious priest works with untiring energy and perseverance to push the sale of his translation of the Bible in twenty-two volumes, and as earnestly and zealously to force the sale of the Gazette de France and the Corsaire Satan, of both of which he is the sole proprietor, yet though the holy man would go great lengths to bring together the royalists and republicans, I do not believe he would so far commit himself, even for this purpose, as to be hail, fellow, well-met! with every Frippe-lippe of a minor theatre, every fille au vilain (car qui eu donnera le plus l'aura) of the pavé of Paris, every fire-eater of the Champs Elysées, and every cogger of dice of the Rue Louis le Grand. Such an assembly is only fit for the refuse of the Roman Feuilleton, or La Cour du Roi Pétaud.

"Chacun y contredit; chacun y parle haut;

Et c'est tout justement la Cour du Roi Pétaud."

As to Colnet, the glory and the pride of the Gazette de France, he was a noble by birth though a bookseller by trade; and even though he were inclined to social and convivial meetings, which he was not, would have chosen his society amongst the distinguished and the learned rather than among the rake-helly riff-raff so often named. As to Michaud of the Quotidienne, he loved "Crusaders" of a holier war than a war of drabs and doubloons. Nay, even the writers in the Republican National have tastes and habits more aristocratic than to be seen in such society. The chivalrous though mistaken Armand Carrel would not have marched through Coventry in such company; and Marrast and La Roche, as well as Bastide and Thomas, have always, to their honour be it said, expressed the greatest con

* Molière.

tempt for those dabblers in the funds and railways belonging to the subordinate ranks of the press, who are enabled to live like financiers and agents de change, having a dancer or a singer for a mistress, and an operabox for an evening lounge.

The Siècle is, as you are aware, a paper established within the last eleven years, yet it has a greater circulation than any journal in Paris. It counts 42,000 subscribers, and the shares are now worth nearly ten times their original cost. This journal represents the grocers, chandlers, shoemakers, and tailors of the metropolis, and its banlieue; and as it is necessary to be somewhat dull and very decorous to please this majority, neither Chambolle nor Gustave Beaumont would run the risk of keeping ill company. Leon Faucher, of his own mere motion, would shun such men as the Beauvallons, thinking them neither men of probity nor men of letters; and the pompous and solemn Barrot would think them too fast-livers, and far too lavish in their expenditure, to suit his temper or his taste. The men of the Démocratie Pacifique, the Communists and Fourierists, would hold nothing in common with gluttons, gamblers, and debauchees. Hugh Doherty the writing-master, Victor Daly the architect, Brisbane the North American, Considérant the ex-officer of engineers, Meill the German Jew, and Jourmet the working man, with his long beard and paletot à capuchon, the indispensable costume of all good Fourierists, would have been out of place in such gay company, with a puré de gibier for a soup, and filets de laperaux à la Voppalière for a pièce de résistance. Only think of Doherty and Daly swallowing hermitage and château du pape, and the Jew Meill eating oreilles de cochon en menu du roi, without being aware of the forbidden food he had just swallowed. Little Lesseps, of the Esprit Public, comes of a consular family, and holds his head too high to stoop so low. And as to the writers in the Revue des Deux Mondes, they look to be administrators and functionaries; and it would not do for such men to consort with the cogging and